NEW YORK — Roman Storm, the Twister Money developer standing trial in Manhattan on prices that the privateness instrument he created helped hackers and different cyber criminals launder greater than $1 billion in prison proceeds, will not take the stand, his attorneys instructed the courtroom on Tuesday.
Storm instructed District Choose Katherine Polk Failla of the U.S. District Court docket of the Southern District of New York (SDNY) that he was conscious that he had the fitting to testify in his personal protection however selected to not. After Storm made his choice, his protection group, led by Keri Axel and Brian Klein of Waymaker LLP, rested their case on Tuesday afternoon.
Over three days of witness testimony, the protection argued that Storm was merely the developer of a reputable privateness instrument that was typically exploited by dangerous actors – one thing which he and his co-founders might do little to truly cease, as a result of the Twister Money protocol and its swimming pools had been immutable. Whereas Storm and the opposite Twister Money co-founders made cash from the sale of TORN tokens, they didn’t revenue straight from Twister Money, witnesses testified. And, although prosecutors tried to painting Storm and his co-founders as detached — even callous — to the plight of hack victims whose cash was laundered via Twister Money, witness testimony, group chats and messages confirmed that Storm and his co-founders had been sad with hackers utilizing their platform.
In messages between Storm and his co-founder, Roman Semenov (who additionally faces the identical prices and stays at giant), Storm expressed concern within the wake of main hacks, together with the 2022 hack of Ronin Bridge, through which North Korean hackers stole $600 million and funneled a portion of the proceeds via Twister Money. Within the chat, Storm and Semenov mentioned including the hackers’ pockets to the Twister Money consumer interface’s blocked listing.
“We urgently want to inform everybody we are not looking for these people to the entrance,” Storm instructed Semenov.
In one other string of messages following the Ronin Bridge hack, Storm instructed Semenov that the hackers’ use of Twister Money was “very critical.”
After the 2022 hack of the Concord Horizon Bridge, through which some proceeds flowed via Twister Money, Storm — messaging with Haseeb Qureshi, managing accomplice at crypto enterprise capital agency Dragonfly Capital that invested nearly $1 million in Twister Money father or mother PepperSec Inc. — stated: “I’m glad these fuckers are detected.”
Worth of privateness
Storm’s protection elicited witness testimony detailing non-criminal explanation why somebody would possibly need to use a instrument like Twister Money to separate their id from their monetary transactions.
Dr. Matthew Inexperienced, famend cryptography professional and professor of laptop science at Johns Hopkins College, instructed the jury on Tuesday that the dearth of privateness was a “bug” within the majority of cryptocurrencies, exposing customers to threats from hackers and different attackers.
Inexperienced — who supplied his professional witness companies to Storm’s protection at no cost — defined that, with out a instrument like Twister Money, Ethereum customers are exposing delicate private data with each transaction, together with how a lot cash they’ve, what they spend it on and who they affiliate with. This presents a variety of safety dangers, together with phishing makes an attempt, fraud and in-person “wrench assaults,” which Inexperienced defined have been “accelerating” in recent times.
Subsequent steps
Whether or not the jury will facet with the prosecution’s view of Twister Money or the protection’s has but to be determined.
Tomorrow, each side may have an opportunity to summarize their arguments in closing statements to the jury, after which the jury might be instructed by the choose on the fees in opposition to Storm after which launched to deliberate.